This year, come to SAP TechEd in Las Vegas from October 2–5 and learn how SAP Leonardo industry innovation kits will rapidly solve your industry-specific challenges.

Intelligence is at the core of innovation today. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are transforming businesses, automating manual and repetitive tasks, increasing productivity, and delivering new sources of competitive advantage. Many organizations are realizing that embracing these intelligent technologies is not a choice, but a necessity.

But how can these new and emergent technologies be applied in your industry? Where do you start on the path to becoming an intelligent enterprise?

SAP can help with taking your first steps. We’ve identified the top challenges in each industry that can now be solved by intelligent technologies and produced the SAP Leonardo industry innovation kits, pre-integrated capabilities that accelerate solving your critical industry problems.

Today, SAP offers 23 industry innovation kits across 12 industries. Each kit provides a fast start by combining pre-integrated software and services into an industry specific solution that can be deployed in a matter of weeks.

Here is a concrete example of the value of industry innovation kits. Let’s look at a supermarket in the retail industry. Most retailers make educated guesses about store traffic from day to day and try to stock their shelves to match it. However, they often overestimate inventory, and with short shelf life products like meat, seafood, dairy, deli products or fresh fruit and vegetables this can result in significant waste and lost revenue. Each year over $47 billion in food is wasted in retail in the U.S. alone; in an industry characterized by razor thin margins, this waste has both a significant economic and societal impacts.

That’s why we’ve developed SAP Leonardo for Retail, zero waste option. This industry innovation kit takes the guesswork out of the equation by leveraging daily demand forecasting, powered by machine learning to automate daily instructions on how much to prepare, bake, and stock on a given day.

Imagine you are a store associate in the deli department. How much should you stock and make today to ensure the shelves are never empty and there is no food wasted at the end of the day? This used to be a manual process but using the zero waste innovation kit, we can start by using a mobile app to see a list of all the items currently available, or we can scan a barcode for the specific item in front of us to go directly to the product SKU. You immediately get a forecast of the number of units that will sell today and can compare this with the number of units in storage and in transit. You can also check the quality of the stock that is currently on shelf and can account for any stock that has been damaged or expired. Now you can submit observations and alert the team that is working on replenishment, so that they know exactly what to make and stock for today.

With SAP Leonardo for Retail, zero waste option, SAP has replaced what was previously a manual error prone process with an accurate machine learning daily demand forecast. This industry innovation kit includes a machine learning model that brings together historical POS data with in-store promotions and external variables like local holidays and the weather forecast, and surfaces a daily demand forecast to the store associate through a mobile app. The store associate then further enriches the forecast by accounting for the condition of the stock on shelf at the start of the shift to provide the instructions for what needs to be prepared, baked or stocked for the day. The solution runs on SAP Cloud Platform, the machine learning model runs natively on SAP HANA, and a dashboard with key performance indicators is surfaced within SAP Analytics Cloud. Any actions taken can be integrated back into your back-end systems, including SAP S/4HANA or SAP Customer Activity Repository, creating a closed loop cycle.

The result is that the zero waste option retail industry innovation kit helps eliminate the guesswork by delivering a daily demand forecast for short shelf life food, providing greater insight and visibility across all levels of the organization thereby helping significantly reduce waste. SAP has been working with several supermarkets around the world and has seen this innovation kit leveraged with meat and seafood, deli products, fresh produce, and baked goods.

With one SAP retail customer, waste in just one department was costing the company over $100 million a year and based on the initial results of the zero waste option retail innovation kit, estimates are that waste will be reduced by 25 to 30 percent. Those cost savings are expected to go up over time because the more the machine learning model is used the smarter and more accurate it becomes.

This was just one example of an industry innovation kit in retail. SAP Leonardo has over 23 kits available today across 12 industries that accelerate solving critical industry problems. In addition to SAP Leonardo for Retail, zero waste option, here are a few of the other popular industry innovation kits:

SAP Leonardo for Automotive, fleet insights option: This innovation kit is relevant for any organization managing a fleet of cars, trucks, or other vehicles. Track fleet status, including utilization, vehicle outages, and parts inventory monitoring, to improve fleet availability, and margins.

SAP Leonardo for Life Sciences, cold chain logistics option: Keep track of time out of refrigeration for temperature-sensitive ingredients and products to eliminate spoilage and ensure compliance with temperature control regulations.

With each industry innovation kit, SAP has done the heavy lifting. Each kit includes pre-integrated SAP Leonardo technologies — like IoT, analytics and machine learning — running on SAP Cloud platform with sample data. In this way, we can rapidly deliver a working prototype to your organization in just six to eight weeks.

You can learn more about the industry innovation kits at SAP TechEd, taking place next week in Las Vegas, or visit www.sap.com/leonardo to find the industry innovation kit that can help start you on the path to becoming an intelligent enterprise.

Jayne Landry is global vice president of Product Management for SAP Leonardo and Analytics at SAP.